Stop Press! It's official. You're better off promoting people randomly

Those fine people at the Improbable Research Institute have awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for Management to Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
 

So that's it. Maths supports what many people strongly suspected to be true for years.The Peter Principle is real. We can replace all those pointless appraisal systems with a random number generator.

Read their paper here.